“So we had this atmosphere where any case involving racial issues was overshadowed by the politicians,” Poole explained. “Everybody on the department was afraid to make a mistake, or even to do the right thing if it exposed them to criticism.”
Poole could claim more immunity to charges of racial insensitivity than nearly any other white officer in the department. During his sixteen-and-a-half years on the job, he had been partnered with a series of black officers who uniformly praised his ability to deal with the citizens of South Central Los Angeles. At South Bureau Homicide, he regularly sat in on meetings of the black officers’ organization, the Oscar Joel Bryant Association. And as a patrol officer in Southwest Division, Poole had been widely admired for insisting that if the LAPD was going to bust black gangbangers for spraying freeway underpasses with graffiti, then it had to do the same when it caught the fraternity boys from USC painting city streets with their insignia. Poole became a minor celebrity within the department when he arrested the white starting quarterback of USC’s football team.
As Poole soon would discover, however, neither his sterling reputation nor Frank Lyga’s persuasive story of self-defense would be enough to protect them in a maze where corpses collected in culde-sacs, and criminals with badges blocked the exits.
From Sharitha Knight’s house, Poole and Det. Supervisor Miller drove to the LAPD’s North Hollywood Station to interview Frank Lyga. The detectives already knew that Lyga had started his day with a practice session at the LAPD shooting range, scoring 100 percent with both a 12-gauge shotgun and the same Beretta pistol that had killed Kevin Gaines. Lyga then joined seven other undercover officers in a surveillance operation that ended shortly before 4 P.M., when the group was ordered to return to its office. During the drive back to Hollywood, the other members of the team drove both ahead of and behind Lyga in separate vehicles.
Lyga said had no idea what set Gaines off initially, describing his fellow officer as “a full-on gangbanger.” For one thing, the guy was driving a green SUV, which had become the vehicle of choice for both Crips and Bloods. And he had recognized those hand gestures Gaines made as West Coast gang signs, Lyga said. Describing his verbal exchange with Gaines and the subsequent car chase, Lyga sounded genuinely frightened. As he saw Gaines pursuing him south on Cahuenga Boulevard, Lyga said, he activated the concealed radio in his car with his left foot and spoke into the microphone hidden behind a visor at the top of his windshield, using Tactical Frequency 2 to advise the other members of his team that he needed assistance with a black guy in a green Jeep who was acting crazy and possibly had a gun.
When he was stopped by the red light at Regal Place and looked in his rearview mirror to see Gaines’s vehicle closing fast, Lyga said, he drew his own pistol and placed it on his lap. Gaines was shouting at the top of his lungs when he braked to a stop in the far left lane, Lyga said, screaming, “I’ll cap you, motherfucker!” as he raised a pistol and pointed it through his open passenger-side window. He knew “cap” was street slang for kill, and fired his own weapon first because he believed he was about to be shot. He had never seen Kevin Gaines before and did not realize the mess he was in, Lyga said, until his supervisor Dennis Zeuner arrived on the scene and told him, “You’re gonna have to suck this one up, Frank. The guy was a policeman.”
Poole returned to the shooting scene from the North Hollywood Station and did not get home until almost 3 A.M. He caught four hours sleep, then awoke the next morning to the first of many “Cop Kills Cop” headlines that would be published worldwide. This was followed shortly by the news that as many as a dozen off-duty black police officers had begun to canvas the neighborhood surrounding the shooting scene, looking for witnesses who would “dirty up Lyga.” The first to complain was an employee of the coffee importing company whose offices were directly across from the intersection where Gaines had been shot. Five black men wearing civilian clothes showed up at her place of business that day, the woman said, told her they were police officers, and began to question her in a manner she found “intimidating.” When the man who did most of the talking began “trying to get me to change my story,” the woman said, she demanded proof that he was a police officer. The man showed her his badge, the woman explained, and she wrote down the name and serial number. He was Derwin Henderson, a close friend and former partner of Gaines. Several other witnesses told LAPD investigators that the black officers who visited them had tried to put words in their mouths, and that they had been shaken by the experience.
Lyga’s version of events was supported by every bit of available evidence, however. Several members of his undercover team, as well as a clerk assigned to monitor tactical frequency radio calls at the LAPD’s West Bureau Narcotics Unit, had heard the detective turn on his radio shortly before the shooting and announce in an excited voice, “I’ve got a problem. There’s a black guy in a green Jeep on my ass. I need you guys.” “I think he’s got a gun,” they heard Lyga call in an even louder voice a few moments after that. “Where are you guys?” Approximately thirty seconds later, the members of Lyga’s team heard him shout, “I just shot somebody! I need help!”
Witnesses to the shooting gave statements that agreed with Lyga’s account in every detail. On the floor of the Montero next to Kevin Gaines’s body, the two CHP officers on the scene had found a Smith and Wesson 9mm semiautomatic pistol with a hollow-point round in the chamber and eleven more bullets like it in the magazine. The gun was registered to Gaines.
Pressure on Frank Lyga, though, continued to mount. Even as media trucks laid siege to the detective’s home, rumors spread that Lyga was part of a white supremacist group that had “targeted” Gaines as a warning to uppity black cops, or that Lyga had killed Gaines to cover up his part in a drug deal gone bad, or that Lyga had a history of armed attacks on black people and the LAPD was covering it up.
Detectives involved in the investigation of the shooting, however, already knew that the bad cop in this case was Kevin Gaines. Within forty-eight hours of Gaines’s death, Poole and Miller learned that the dead officer had been involved in at least four other off-duty “roadway incidents” in which he had threatened motorists with violence. One of these drivers was retired LAPD Detective Sig Schien, who reported that during the later summer of 1996 Gaines had used a dark green Mitsubishi Montero to cut him off as he turned out of the Valley Credit Union parking lot on Sherman Way. He responded by flipping the Montero’s driver off, Schien admitted. Gaines became so enraged that he attempted to run Schien’s car off the road, then began motioning to pull over. When he did exactly that, Schien said, Gaines braked to a stop, jumped out of his SUV, and began shouting, “Hey, motherfucker, you going around giving people the finger? I ought to cap you. I ought to blow your motherfucking head off.” Only when he told Gaines, “You’d better be a faster shot than me,” then began repeating the Montero’s license plate number out loud, Schien said, did a “flustered” Gaines climb back into his vehicle and burn rubber as he sped from the scene.
A civilian named Alex Szlay reported that just two weeks before his death, Gaines, accompanied by an attractive black woman, had swerved the green Montero in front of him so sharply that he was forced to change lanes to avoid a collision. When he became infuriated, Szlay said, Gaines shouted at him through his open window, “Do you have a problem? Because we can settle this quick.” He asked what that meant, Szlay said, and Gaines replied, “I have this and this,” then held up a pistol and an LAPD badge. Gaines and his female passenger were laughing hysterically, Szlay said, as they peeled away.
A Pacific Bell repairman told investigators that he had been on Laurel Canyon Boulevard just north of the Hollywood Freeway when Gaines pulled up alongside his truck in an SUV and began shouting that “he was going to put a cap up my ass.” He wasn’t sure what he had done to offend the driver of the SUV, the repairman said, and didn’t know how seriously to take the threat, since the “nice-looking black female” in the passenger seat was laughing and grinning. Sudde
nly, though, the driver pulled up right next to the truck’s open passenger-side window and pointed a gun at him, the repairman recalled. Fortunately, instead of firing, the driver made an abrupt U-turn and entered a Hollywood Freeway on-ramp.
Gaines’s commander in Pacific Division, Captain David Doan, advised Poole that Gaines had been accused repeatedly of “discourtesy” and “unnecessary force” in his dealings with white, Hispanic, and Asian suspects. Doan described Gaines as a “mediocre” officer, and said the man had a history of domestic violence; his wife Georgia twice had called the police to complain that Gaines was beating her, but both times recanted.
Internal Affairs investigators confirmed reports that Gaines had been detained by LAPD officers on three separate occasions while off duty. The first incident had occurred on Sunset Boulevard when Gaines stuck his head through the moonroof of a passing limousine and shouted at some passing cops, “Fuck the police!” When they pulled the limousine over, officers said, Gaines did his best to provoke a physical confrontation before finally identifying himself as an LAPD officer. Gaines also had been investigated by the LAPD for stealing another officer’s customized handcuffs and scratching out his initials. Gaines should have been fired for that offense, but Internal Affairs claimed to have misplaced the file.
All these reports of the slain officer’s misbehavior had been compiled during the investigation of an even more bizarre incident involving Gaines. On the afternoon of August 16, 1996, two separate patrol cars from the LAPD’s North Hollywood Division responded to a report that an assault with a deadly weapon had just taken place at a home on Multiview Avenue belonging to Sharitha Knight. Shots had been fired, an anonymous caller told the 911 operator, and there was a possible victim down by the pool area. When four LAPD officers arrived at the address, they were confronted by Kevin Gaines. Gaines answered the first few questions they asked, the officers agreed, but then became uncooperative, refusing them access to the residence. At one point, Gaines threw his shoulder into Officer Pedy Gonzalez, and was placed in handcuffs. “I’m a Police Officer III just like you, motherfucker,” Gaines told him, according to Gonzalez. “I work at Pacific and you motherfuckers are not coming in. Tell these motherfuckin’ assholes to take the cuffs off me, motherfucker.” Gaines also said he hated “fucking cops,” Gonzalez recalled. What made the incident really strange, though, was that when LAPD officers listened to the tape of the 911 call (made from a pay phone near Sharitha Knight’s home) reporting that someone had been shot at the Multi-view mansion, they unanimously agreed that the voice of the caller belonged to Kevin Gaines. Perhaps oddest of all, Gaines had described himself as the suspect: a black male with a muscular build, 5′10″, 200 pounds, thirty years old.
Poole would conclude that Gaines’s intention in making the call had been to produce an incident that might provide grounds for a lawsuit. And this Gaines had accomplished, persuading former Rodney King attorney Milton Grimes to file a multimillion dollar court claim against the city of Los Angeles, alleging that the incident had damaged the “emotional and psychological well-being” of a “competent African-American adult.”
“Attempting to profit financially is what elevates a fraudulent 911 call from a misdemeanor to a felony,” Poole explained, “and I can guarantee that any civilian who did what Gaines did would have faced prison time.” Yet Kevin Gaines was never charged with any crime at all. The investigation of his conduct was handed over to Internal Affairs, which proceeded to build its case for Gaines’s dismissal from the department with such deliberation that from outside it looked like a stall.
“I was completely shocked when I read the LAPD reports about Gaines’s criminal behavior,” Poole recalled, “because both Willie Williams and especially Chief Parks had to have known about this stuff for months. Yet they both showed up at Gaines’s funeral and stood there nodding as Gaines was praised as this great police officer and fine family man. They knew what he was, but neither of them said a word. And meanwhile Frank Lyga is just hanging out there, getting crucified in the media.”
Lyga’s media crucifixion was orchestrated mainly by O.J. Simpson’s attorney Johnnie Cochran, who had filed a $25 million lawsuit against the city on behalf of Kevin Gaines’s family. “As soon as Cochran got involved in this case the race card was being played,” Lyga recalled. “Suddenly I saw myself being described in the media as ‘a racist, out of control cop with a history.’” A week after the funeral, nearly a dozen television cameras were positioned inside the First African Methodist Church, where nearly forty black police officers, most of them members of the Oscar Joel Bryant Association, joined Gaines’s family in venting their outrage over the shooting in North Hollywood. The Inglewood City Council presented the Gaines family with a plaque that recognized the dead man as an “honorable and fine police officer” who was “killed in the line of duty.” Spokespersons for the activist group Police Watch said they believed the shooting had been racially motivated. Online postings described Gaines as a target of LAPD harrassment and insisted that “physical evidence points to a cover-up.” The Los Angeles Watts Times and Louis Farrakhan’s The Final Call published articles that all but portrayed Frank Lyga as a cold-blooded killer.
After his transfer from the undercover unit to an office assignment, Lyga was not only shunned by many fellow officers, but also subjected to a series of anonymous death threats. Even though it had been reported by the media (and was unchallenged by even a single witness) that Frank Lyga and Kevin Gaines had never met before the day of the shooting, the president of the Oscar Joel Bryant Association, LAPD Sergeant Leonard Ross, told the Los Angeles Daily News that a number of white officers had envied Gaines’s “lifestyle.” “I’ll say it,” Ross told the newspaper. “There were a number of officers, who weren’t black, who were jealous of his ability and resources.”
Frank Lyga received almost no support from the LAPD brass until Russell Poole presented them with a piece of evidence that ultimately vindicated the undercover officer. This was a videotape shot from a surveillance camera aimed out the front door of the am-pm mini-mart where Kevin Gaines had died. The tape clearly showed Lyga’s Buick being chased by Gaines’s Montero, then recorded the sound of two gunshots (fired two seconds apart, in a “controlled pattern,” just as Lyga had claimed) shortly after the Montero passed out of the camera’s range. The Montero reentered the picture thirteen seconds later, as it coasted into the mini-mart’s parking lot.
“I’m glad I got that tape when I did,” Poole recalled, “because the very next day Johnnie Cochran’s people showed up at the market and tried to buy it. The owner called me up and said, ‘I need my tape back.’ I said, ‘Sorry, pal, it’s evidence.’ He said, ‘I’m gonna get my attorney and sue.’ I said, ‘See you in court.’ When I saw what was on the tape, I was awfully happy I kept it.”
Cochran’s incursion into the case changed everything for the LAPD detectives in charge of the investigation. “As soon as Cochran gets involved, the brass is too,” Poole recalled. “They’re all putting their heads together and figuring out how to control this thing. And then we had Farrakhan’s people following the case. It was almost like the racial aspect of this thing was taking on a life of its own.” Two days after the shooting, Captain Doan of Pacific Division reported to Internal Affairs that he sensed a growing “divisiveness among his officers along racial lines.”
“Pretty soon after that we’re getting reports from all over the city about debates between black police officers and all other police officers about who is at fault here,” Poole recalled. “We were told that a group of officers almost came to blows at a gas pump. But nobody really knew the truth about Gaines. If they had, I think most of the black officers would have backed off.”
Frank Lyga knew that Det. Poole was his hope for vindication. “I filled him in about Gaines’s past bad conduct, and Lyga needed to hear that, because nobody was on his side and the media was pounding him relentlessly,” Poole said. “I told him to hang tough, but I also ha
d to tell him that the brass didn’t seem to want to make any of this information public. I said, ‘Frank, it’s out of my control, but I’m getting a funny feeling. They don’t want me to investigate Gaines’s background.’ He said, ‘You’re kidding.’ I said, ‘Sorry, that’s the orders. But I want you to know that any information I collect I am writing down and passing along. And I’m convinced that the truth will come out eventually.’
“What worried me, though, was that everything seemed to be funneled into Internal Affairs Division. I’m beginning to understand that this is how they control an investigation, and limit what comes out in the media. I see how each report that the IA investigators file is a little more watered down than the one before it. But even then, I was shocked when I saw the final Internal Affairs report, because of how much they left out. It was amazingly incomplete. And Chief Parks was in charge of that.”
Deputy Chief Parks and his Internal Affairs investigators also were in charge of investigating the complaints made by witnesses about the bullying tactics of Derwin Henderson and the other off-duty black officers who had questioned them. After interviewing the woman who worked at the coffee company, Poole and Miller reported that they believed Henderson’s conduct had crossed the line into felony intimidation of a witness. One day later, an order came down from the upper echelon of Internal Affairs Division that Henderson was to be served with a “stay away” order, then placed under surveillance by a team of IA investigators. That surveillance lasted only one day, however. When the IA investigators reported that they had followed Henderson to “three locations they suspected might be bookmaking locations,” they immediately were advised that “surveillance of Henderson is discontinued pending further direction.” Even when Henderson showed up at the LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division to take personal possession of the green Montero, no order to resume surveillance was issued. “Henderson already had committed what would have been considered a serious crime if a civilian did it,” Poole said, “but it was becoming obvious no charges would be filed.”
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